Tag Archives: Data backup and recovery

02.03.14
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The Trends Causing the reevaluation of Data Protection Solutions

Customers using Data Backup and Recovery Solutions are reevaluating their present backup and recovery strategies. This is being motivated due to the increase in data complexity because of data variety, velocity and volume. The old IT process of delegating the data backup and recovery responsibilities to ‘the new guy’ are coming to an end. It is too important to treat Data Protection with anything less than a mission-critical effort.

Complex data This IDC study examines the worldwide data protection and recovery software market for the period from 2012 to 2017.

The abstract reads:

“The worldwide data protection and recovery software market in 2012 experienced continued growth as a result of a broad-based economic recovery. In addition, the worldwide data protection and recovery software market posted significant gains because of the greater adoption of storage optimization technologies such as data deduplication and the growth of customers needing to extend their protection schema to their rapidly growing virtualized protection environments,” said Robert Amatruda, research director for Data Protection and Recovery at IDC. “However, we have discovered incumbent vendors are vulnerable when customers reevaluate their data protection solutions, especially when customers are experiencing pain points associated with unabated data growth, the inability to meet aggressive SLAs, and a growing need to protect virtual machines (VMs).”

There is another market trend that is in play during this reevaluation of data protection strategies. That is the increased interest in employing a cloud provider for these services in the form of a managed service provider (MSP). The IT staff is overloaded with other duties and does not generally have the in depth training now needed to meet the challenge of protecting Big Data. Hpwever, reluctance to embrace a cloud solution can occur when the realization that the data may need to be relinquished to the cloud. However, this is not necessarily true.

A customer can choose to have the management of the data backup and restore processes provided by an MSP without moving the live data from the customer’s network. The management of the processes can be managed remotely by a data backup and recovery MSP while the live data remains within the customer’s environment. Salvus Data Consultants provide this model. The result is experienced Data B/R consultants are planning and managing this very critical function while freeing up the IT staff to concentrate on their areas of expertise.

As companies continue to require comprehensive data analytics using Big Data to remain competitive, then the need for sophisticated data backup and recovery processes will continue to increase in importance.

01.23.14
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Can the Data Remain Within the Customer’s Control While Data Backup and Recovery is Moved to the Cloud?

Nine out of ten global CEOs view the cloud as critical to their business plans according to IBM.

Junior technician learning Data backupIt is no surprise that IBM Pulse 2014 is shaping up to be another very successful conference. Pulse is IBM’s premier cloud conference. It is being held in Las Vegas on February 23rd through the 26th.

The conference will be covering the power of cloud computing. Included in this discussion are Managed Service Providers (MSP), from cloud and storage to traditional data center, managed network services, and mobile device management. Eighty-five percent of new software this year will be built for cloud delivery.

When the term “cloud” is mentioned, most of us visualize a specific service  that we are familiar. We also visualize that service to be all-inclusive. An example would be data backup and recovery where all the data and the processes are expected to be deployed in the cloud. But, this is not the only model that is possible. A hybrid model may be the preferred in certain cases.

In the case of data backup and recovery, for instance, the data can remain within the customer’s network and deployed off site at the customer’s choice location, while the processes are managed in the cloud. The benefit gained by deploying the data backup processes in the cloud is having the management of the data backup and recovery performed and scheduled remotely by data consultants that specialize in this field. An additional benefit is to remove the burden from the already stretched IT staff.

As we have discussed in previous posts, the alternative of moving the process of data backup and recovery to the cloud is all too often to pick the most junior IT professional on staff and assign that person the task of data backup processes. Picking a junior person for this task  ‘ticks the box’ for upper management and all is well. That is until disaster strikes and that data needs to be recovered. This is to say nothing of the daily and weekly inefficiencies that can be caused by data backup processes developed by an inexperienced individual.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting a DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes.

01.01.14
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Data Backup and Recovery Considerations for Hadoop and Big Data

IBM says that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. IBM  also says that 80% of data captured today is unstructured. Sources of unstructured data are, among others, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, point-of-sale systems. All of this unstructured data can be termed as Big Data.

Salvus Data ConsultantsBecause of the wide-ranging benefits that small and medium size businesses can gain from Big Data in today’s competitive world, many are implementing a local Big Data strategy. To help businesses of all sizes manage Big Data, there is Hadoop. The Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.

The Hadoop project has various elements. Below are a few of the more pertinent :

  • Hadoop Common – libraries and utilities
  • Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) – a distributed file-system that stores data on commodity servers while providing high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster.
  • Hadoop MapReduce – The “Map” step takes the input, divides it into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes.  The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes it to its master node. The “Reduce” step then collects the answers to all the sub-problems and combines them to form the output.

As stated by Nathan Coutinho in his CDW Blog article  5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Data Center for Big Data “The whole point of Hadoop is to keep the data local on commodity servers and economical local storage…”

Small and Medium size businesses find Hadoop attractive because of it ability to provide high availability to data on local commodity servers.

A data strategy is never complete without a Data Backup and Recovery strategy. A Big Data implementation using Hadoop presents a need for even more focus on the ability to recover from a catastrophic event quickly. However, the SMB is not often staffed or tooled to design and execute a backup strategy of this level of complexity.  The other consideration is that since the attractiveness of Hadoop is to use local servers, there is a further need to implement a data backup and recover strategy that can be managed remotely but not have a requirement that the live data be transferred to or running in a cloud environment.

There are Data Backup/Recovery Managed Service Providers (DB/R MSP) that provide remote management of the Backup process, along with professional Disaster Backup and Recovery consultation. Contracting an DB/R MSP with the model of remote DB/R management allows the SMB to maintain their data locally without the need to hire new staff or train existing staff in sophisticated data backup and recovery processes. Additionally, the SMB can have a comprehensive Data Backup and Recovery strategy while housing their Big Data locally.